A Jewish Community on the Silk Road
March 21, 2010
In this week’s short article Jews on the Silk Roads, some evidence of Jewish communities on the Silk Routes is provided in a very brief manner. Certain documentations discovered in various places along the silk roads – among these historical areas was the Cave of the Thousand Buddhas – provide strong evidence for the presence of a Jewish community. It is mentioned in this article that a Jewish community existed in the Roman Empire (Constantinople) and also were in Balkans and Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt. Jews did take up trades or were involved in commerce with other Byzantine merchants and traded in sections along the Silk Roads. Jewish communities were also found to exist in Persia and were also found to be engaged in the silk trade. The presence of a Jewish religion was also discovered in China. All the above raises some interesting questions; how did the presence of this religion affect the places in which Jewish communities resided? Also, how did the different areas in which Jewish communities existed differ from each other in terms of belief and interpretation of doctrine?
The emphasis of context, of time, place, etc. has been brought up in many different articles that we have read in this course. Therefore, the context in which these Jewish communities existed is quite important for the study of Jews on the Silk Roads. How did they practice? How did their beliefs manifest? How did they effect, or how where they effect by the corresponding communities that they lived in/near by?
Further in this article, Lena Cansdale begins to very briefly outline the writing of Ibn Khurdadhbhih – “Postmaster General of Baghdad”. He writes, “They (Jewish merchants) speak Arabic, Persian, Greek (Rumiya), Frankish, Spanish and Slav. They journey from East to West and West to East by land and by sea.” This provides some inclination of how different communities affected the Jewish people along the Silk Roads.
